Will Bluesky Embrace Advertising? Yes, But the Question Is How.
I’ve been in the business of making new kinds of media companies, media platforms, and media technologies since before the Web was born, and in every case I’ve partnered with the advertising industry to make it happen — an industry often reviled as the driver of “surveillance capitalism,” the attention-mining, data-driven monster supposedly at the center of the Internet’s enshittification.
So I wasn’t shocked when Bluesky CEO Jay Graber acknowledged last week that advertising might be in the company’s future. The company is growing at a blistering pace, adding tens of millions of users in a matter of months. It costs dearly to service that kind of growth, and the company has investors to appease. Bluesky’s growth mirrors Twitter in 2008–9009 — the year that Twitter first raised capital at a billion-dollar-plus valuation. Twitter proceeded to introduce advertising as its core business model one year later, in 2010.
It’s always tricky to introduce advertising to a new Internet service, and in Bluesky’s case it’s doubly so*. Bluesky built its reputation on being a decentralized antidote to social media’s myriad ills. Built on a protocol that allows its users to decamp for more hospitable climes, BlueSky has to be careful not to employ the kind of rent-seeking practices that catapulted Meta, Google, and Amazon to…
